The yung Novelist is comin’ up in the grime scene, and while he was rightly given props in the BBC’s Sound of 2015 longlist, he wasn’t even the favored grime nod of the panel; that honor went to Stormzy. I mean, Stormzy’s a good MC and all, but he’s really digging from the same mine as grime’s heavyweight figures - y’know, your Wileys and Skeptas - and, if you’re asking me, his instros are solid enough albeit nothing particularly earth-shattering. Novelist, on the other hand, has a real ace up his sleeve in Mumdance, a producer of the Grime 2.0 breed. Their titular collab on the straight-up huge Take Time EP was a thing to behold, and now they’re back and keepin’ it minimal with “1 Sec”. The template is much the same, with ominous kicks and reverb’d claps being the order of the day, but it ain’t going stale anytime soon, especially as Novelist fills the instrumental void left in Mumdance’s wake with some of the tightest bars around: make no mistake, there are some proper ohrwurms to be uncovered here. The biggest leaps and bounds come in the visual department, though, going from that kinda awkward vid for “Take Time” to a nocturnal, impeccably-shot setting, as the duo survey their ends by car. That’s that label money talking!
The 1 Sec EP is out right now on XL Recordings.
• Novelist: https://twitter.com/novelist
• Mumdance: http://mumdance.com
• XL Recordings: http://www.xlrecordings.com
